digital marketingAs a business owner, you may feel as though you’ve done everything that you can to increase your online presence and visibility. You may have a company website and blog, as well as actively use several social media platforms, but for some reason you may not be seeing the traffic and conversions that you expect. If you are tired of lagging behind your competition and would like to see some results, try these nine super useful tips to improve your strategy.

Strategy

1. One way to instantly improve your digital marketing strategy is to simply have one. As basic and obvious as this may sound, there are recent reports that over 64% of small businesses in the UK alone do not have a formal strategy in place.

Of course, many of these businesses still have websites, blogs and even a few social media accounts, but without a formal plan in place, it would be difficult for anyone to take full advantage of the opportunities to create personal relationships with current clients and prospects. It is these relationships that help turn your customers into advocates for your company.

Without a unified plan, you are leaving opportunities on the table and making an opening for your competition to come in and steal away your potential fans, followers and converts.

Messagebranding

2. When creating a digital marketing strategy, it’s easy to be wrapped up in conveying the same message across all of your company’s platforms. In the process, you might forget that social media is only successful when you give clients and prospective customers what they want, when they want it.

This is not to say that branding is no longer important, or that you should embrace inconsistency. What this means is that when designing and implementing a digital marketing strategy, you have to keep in mind that the way that you communicate your company’s message and vision will be different depending on which type of social media platform you happen to be using at the moment.  Alter how you convey your message based on the best practices for each type of social media platform.

Visibility

3. A third way to improve your strategy and increase your company’s outreach, visibility and conversion is to ensure that social media is fully integrated on all of your channels. This is true, whether it’s your company sales and landing pages, your blog, your YouTube account, your online profiles such as Google+, or any of your branded social media accounts. In this way customers can easily find and connect with you when it’s convenient to them and on their own terms.

For the best results, you should always make it easy for your customer to like, share, comment, tweet and pin your posts regardless of which platform or account that they use to interact with you.

Revision

4. With the knowledge that digital marketing can make or break a business, many owners are afraid to change anything about their existing digital marketing strategy. Most simply “roll over” what they did last year into the current year – even if the current system is not working.

If your current strategy isn’t giving you the results you expect and need, don’t be afraid you will “break” something by making changes.  Don’t be afraid to shake things up. Regardless of how well your strategy seems to be working, it is always a good idea to periodically “go back to the drawing board,” and analyse, reconsider and test everything.  If you don’t have the skills to do this yourself, don’t be afraid to ask for help from an outside expert. A fresh set of eyes and ideas may be just what you need to invigorate your company’s strategy and see results.

digital marketingGo Mobile

5. As you went social, did you forget to go local and mobile? The mobile market for search increases every day, with most searches for services being conducted on platforms other than a traditional PC or laptop. Sadly, if the display for your website isn’t configured for mobile users, it’s difficult or impossible for them to see your content.

No matter how socially integrated your site may be with social media, it’s a waste if it can’t be accessed on mobile platforms and if it isn’t targeted for local search results! A key part of honing your focus with your digital marketing strategy is to ensure that you are creating SEO content that is both local to your target market and location as well as configured to be easily accessible to mobile platform users.

Focus

6.  Narrow the focus of your site and blog posts to increase your brand’s popularity, trustworthiness and authority. While it’s important to convey your personality in your posts on your blog, sales page, online profiles, multimedia channels and social media accounts, it’s also important to remain focused on who your target market and audience is and if they will find your content unique, helpful,  relevant and even entertaining.

You can make this process easier by creating categories for your posts and ensuring that you remain on topic, even when you share personality infused posts. Post content on too many unrelated topics, and your target audience might lose trust in your authority, even if they are entertained.

Competition

7. As part of your company’s comprehensive digital marketing strategy, don’t forget about your competition, because they certainly haven’t forgotten about you. Don’t be afraid to use tools to evaluate the content on your competitor’s website, blog and social media accounts.

Dig deep and find out what their most popular posts are and how well trusted their site is to other users. Pay attention to how they interact with your mutual market.  See what is working for them, and what isn’t and always ask yourself what can you improve, what can you do better, in order to gain the edge.

Real-timemarketing in real time

8.  Another way to improve your strategy and results is to fully integrate your digital marketing efforts with opportunities to interact with your current and prospective clients in real time.

Whether you hold regular in-person meetings, hang out online on Google+, use text chats, web chats, online seminars or even participate in sessions where you discuss topics through tweets on Twitter, take full advantage of these opportunities to connect with your clients on a personal level. You can increase the impact of these opportunities by making it easy for your clients to like, comment, post, tweet and otherwise share these experiences with others.

SEO

9. While the practice of placing paid ads on social media platforms continues to grow, don’t make the mistake of discounting your continued need for original SEO content.  Some business owners continue to make the mistake of not having a blog, or only participate in one or two social media accounts.

Having high quality, original SEO content on all of the places and platforms with which you interact with your clients, continues to be the chief cornerstone of any comprehensive digital marketing strategy. Another growing trend, and part of improving your digital marketing strategy, is to look past posts of text and include relevant audio and video posts on your platforms.

 

Be certain to let us know when you try these 9 super useful tips to improve your digital marketing strategy. Let us know your results in the comments section below, and also feel free to share any additional ideas that you have to shake up the status quo and improve your digital marketing results.